Incase someone stumbles across the same problem, here is how i managed to restore my db.
I tried many different versions of mysql but all of them refused to start. The best i managed to do was to get it to start but with missing table contents by deleting the ibdata1 files.
Switching from windows to linux (since i knew the original db was running on a linux server i thought this might be worth a try) didn’t help either.
In the end i tried to install MariaDB (since it supports all features of MySQL and adds some of its own) and it worked.
Here are the steps:
- Install MariaDB
- Start it by navigating your cmd console into the
binfolder of the installation and starting it by typingmariadbd.exe --console. - this will create the data structure. now you can close the cmd box
- move the contents of your old db into the data directory ( in my case
C:\Program Files\MariaDB 10.5\data) - now restart the service as mentioned above
- you should now be able to login and see your old db with all of it’s data accesable
From here on i recommend making a proper backup using mysqldump.exe:
- again navigate a cmd into the bin folder (C:\Program Files\MariaDB 10.5\bin)
- with this command you can create a sql file that you than can import into your wordpress server
mysqldump.exe --user=YourUserName --password=YourPassword --host=localhost --port=3306 --result-file="Pathdump.sql" --databases "DatabaseName"